More-Than-Human Gaze

The screening event “More-than-human gaze” at the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw showcased different approaches to exploring more-than-human perspectives in contemporary video art. Whether through storytelling, visual meditation or scientific examination, the invited artists use the video medium as a vehicle to challenge anthropocentric ideologies and break away with the human desire to catalogue and measure nature, instead immersing audiences in the worlds of more-than-human actors: animals, objects, plants, minerals, otherworldly creatures, viruses and machines. Their works offer pathways for empathy, understanding and recognizing similarity and difference: I am the other, the other is me. In their mind’s eye, there are no clear boundaries between human and more-than-human realms, and the conventional, human-centric viewpoint is just one of a myriad of possible ways of looking at reality.

The event consisted of three screening sessions of videos and a sound performance by the collective Grounding Radio.

Sasha Litvintseva & Bary Wagner, “A Demonstration”

“A Demonstration” is a monster film with no monsters. Inspired by the existence of taxonomies of monsters at the heart of Early Modern European science, the film explores and reinterprets a way of seeing the natural world that is almost impossible to imagine from today’s vantage point. Early Modern naturalists were guided by a logic in which scientific truths were discovered through visual analogy. The word ‘monster’ comes from the latin ‘monstrare’, meaning to show, to reveal, to demonstrate. “A Demonstration” picks up on these themes in a poetic exploration of the boundaries of sight and the metamorphosis of form.